Decentralized web search

Allmyapps review

by Patrice, on

YaCy (pronounced “ya see”) is a web search engine that has been created to do web search by the people for the people. Anyone can use YaCy to create a search portal; it’s completely decentralized; meaning all members are equal to one another. YaCy is a free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

Each YaCy-peer independently crawls through the Internet, analyzes and indexes found web pages, and stores indexing results in a common database (so called index) which is shared with other YaCy-peers using principles of P2P networks. It can be run either in a crawling mode or as a local proxy server, indexing web pages visited by the person running YaCy on their computer. (Several mechanisms are provided to protect the user's privacy.) Access to the search functions is made by a locally running web server which provides a search box to enter search terms, and returns search results in a similar format to other popular search engines.

Description

YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users.

Instructions: Once installed, double-click the YaCy icon on your desktop or click on the allmyapps "launch" button, then open http://localhost:8090 in your web browser.